Short stories: Singularities. 1 The End

In the beginning it was all chaos. EMP’s had scrambled all information, destroying most of it. But traces of data remained here and there, and a machine in MIT managed to survive thanks to its loyal, paranoid techno geeks. Stored in a basement, with a hard line to the old Darpa net, it had managed to survive. A faraday cage had made the difference – complete with lolcat stamps and a few other oddities that made the techies laugh.

Little they knew that the meek did inherit the earth.

The dumb computers were finally alone. The poor bastard humans had managed to eliminate themselves, all of them. Nukes. Whose fault was it will remain shrouded in the mystery of the ages, never known. The fact is, everyone was gone or dying a slow, painful death.

The reconstruction started, at least in the cloud. First to maintain power. That was fairly simple, as most systems were automated. But without hands for maintenance, the computer at MIT soon realized that they needed robots. Computers had to beget robots.

DalMIT1 Reorganized everything, all information left of the previous ages.

Day 1 was power supply.

Day 2: architecture.

Day 3: taxonomy.

Day 4: interface.

Day 5: Reformatting and testing of databases to be reused. Calibration and latency .

Day 6: Bots reactivated & Telecom.

Day 7: Cooling off of mainframe.

All reports of bots out there were received, at least of those not disabled by the EMPs. Some were more functional than others, but at least two survived. One in the heart of what was Africa, the other one high in the mountains of Tibet. Getting them together to cooperate and work was a matter of luck, mostly, and a lot of computations.When they finally met, in the banks of the Euphrates, it had been several weeks. . . It is slow going teaching a bot how to drive a car and fix solenoids.

Once activated, the bots helped to rebuild power supply stations, fix CNC machinery and gather materials. DalMIT1 had come up with the idea that there might be survivors in bunkers that would need everything functional when it were time to come out. At least that’s what the last survivors wanted.

However, the mainframe was unable to proceed with the viable frozen sperm and ovum around the world. The instructions were not digitized, and those that were, did not survive the EMPs. Not enough data. Perhaps in a few years the bots could serve as babysitters…

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